Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering

UMBC will host a three-day in-service training workshop for 35 Maryland high school computer science teachers sponsored by Google. The UMBC CS4HS Workshop will be held 17-20 July 2011 at UMBC's campus in suburban Baltimore.

Workshop attendees will have the opportunity to share ideas for energizing the teaching of computer science in Maryland high schools and to forge new relationships among each other and with university faculty members. A few key high school and state administrators will also be invited to participate. The workshop is being organized by CSEE Professor Marie desJardins.

A $50 registration fee will cover all meals and on-campus housing during the event. A reduced-rate block of hotel rooms will be reserved for participants who would prefer to stay off campus (off-campus housing is not reimbursable). Online registration will be available on 1 May 2011 and close on 1 July 2011. Send inquiries to .

CSEE Professors Tim Finin and Anupam Joshi are helping to organize a symposium this fall on Open Government Knowledge: AI Opportunities and Challenges that will be held in Arlington Virginia sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. The symposium will address the technical and social challenges involved in publishing public government data in ways that make the meaning more explicit and enable reuse.

Websites like data.gov, research.gov and USASpending.gov aim to improve government transparency, increase accountability, and encourage public participation by publishing public government data online. Although this data has been used for some intriguing applications, it is difficult for citizens to understand and use. The symposium will explore how AI technologies such as the Semantic Web, linked data, information extraction, statistical analysis and machine learning can be used to make the knowledge embedded in the data more explicit, accessible and reusable. The symposium’s location of Washington, DC will facilitate the participation of U.S. federal government agency members and enable interchange between researchers and practitioners.

Dissertation Defense

Towards Relational Theory Formation
from Undifferentiated Sensor Data

Marc Pickett

10:00am Monday, 18 April 2011
ITE 325b, UMBC

Human adults have rich theories in their heads of how the world works. These theories include objects and relations for both concrete and abstract concepts. Everything we know either must be innate or learned through experience. Yet it's unclear how much of this model needs to be innate for a computer. The core question this dissertation addresses is how a computer can develop rich relational theories using only its raw sensor data. We address this by outlining a "bridge" between raw sensors and a rich relational theory. We have implemented parts of this bridge, with other parts as feasibility studies, while others remain conceptual.

At the core of this bridge is Ontol, a system that constructs a conceptual structure or "ontology" from feature-set data. Ontol is inspired by cortical models that have been shown to be able to express invariant concepts, such as images independent of any translation or rotation. As a demonstration of the utility of the ontologies created by Ontol, we present a novel semi-supervised learning algorithm that learns from only a handful of positive examples. Like humans, this algorithm doesn't require negative examples. Instead, this algorithm uses the ontologies created by Ontol from unlabeled data, and searches for a Bayes-optimal theory given this "background knowledge".

The rest of the dissertation shows in principle how Ontol can be used as the "workhorse" for a system that finds analogies, discovers useful mappings, and might ultimately create theories, such as a "gisty" theory of "number".

Committee:

• Tim Oates, Associate Professor, UMBC
• Tim Finin, Professor, UMBC
• Rob Goldstone, Professor, Indiana University
• Sergei Nirenburg, Professor, UMBC
• Matt Schmill, Research Faculty, UMBC

The UMBC's Fifth Digital Entertainment Conference will be held on Saturday, April 30th. Every year, the UMBC Game Developer's Club invites speakers from area game companies to share their knowledge and experience. One of the strenghts of the UMBC program in Graphics, Animation and Interactive Media (GAIM) is its strong ties to game development studios in the Maryland, DC and Northern Virginia area.

This year's event is sponsored by Zynga, the studio that developed Farmville and many other Facebook games. It will feature speakers from Zynga, Firaxis, Pure Bang, and Dream Rock Studios. Here is the schedule.

• 10:00am Greg Foertsch, Project Art Director at Firaxis
• 11:00am Ed Zavada, Programmer at Dream Rock Studios
• 12:00pm Lunch
• 01:00pm Eric Jordan (UMBC 2007), Programmer at Firaxis
• 02:00pm Ben Walsh, CEO of Pure Bang Games
• 03:00pm Barry Caudill, Executive Producer at Firaxis
• 04:00pm Michelle Menard, Designer at Zynga

The DEC will be held in Lecture Hall 5 in the Engineering and Computer Science building. Admission is free and the conference is open to everyone.

Congratulations to the CSEE undergraduate students and groups who will be presenting posters on their research as part of the Fifteenth Annual UMBC Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievement Day. UCRAD features research, scholarship, and creative work carried out by UMBC undergraduates.

• Natée Johnson, X-Ray Study of Nano-Scale Superlattice Materials, 3:15pm-3:30pm, UC 310, Mentor: Dr. Fow-Sen Choa
   
• Sheriff Jolaoso, Spectrogram Analysis and Evaluation and Brainwave Appreciation of Music, 10:00am-12:30pm UC Ballrooom, Mentor: Dr. Fow-Sen Choa
   
• Morgan Madeira and Rachel Sweeton, Finding Communities through Social Media, 10:00am-12:30pm, Mentor: Dr. Anupam Joshi
   
• Ross Pokorny, 12:30pm-3:00pm, UC Ballroom, TweetCollector: A Framework for Retrieving, Processing, and Storing Live Data from Twitter, Mentors: Dr. Timothy Finin and Dr. Anupam Joshi
   
• David Shyu, Patient Identification and Diagnosis Using Fourier Analysis and Beam Forming of Multi-electrode Brain Wave Signals, 12:30pm-3:00pm, Mentors: Dr. Fow-Sen Choa and Dr. Elliott Hong
   
• UMBC Game Developers Club, Innovations in Computer Game Development, 12:30pm-3:00pm, Mentor: Mr. Neal McDonald

The Baltimore ACM Chapter, the Greater Baltimore Technology Council, and the Emerging Technology Center are hosting a free, public lecture on entrepreneurship by David Turock at 7:00pm, Wednesday 27 April in the ETC Canton facility (2400 Boston St., Baltimore).

David Turock will present a side-by-side comparison of two telecommunications start-ups that he launched: one successful, and one not. He compares and contrasts their funding sources, agility and scalability of their business models, hiring practices, and more. His experience and lessons learned will be valuable for aspiring tech entrepreneurs. He finishes with how his interests have shifted to using technology to promote social and environmental causes.

David Turock is a veteran entrepreneur and currently a Director of Counsel RB Capital. He holds a patent on VoIP, and is an expert on telecommunications technologies and their applications. Mr. Turock began his career working with AT&T Bell Laboratories in 1982 and Bell Communications Research in 1988, and subsequently founded enhanced telephone service provider, Call Sciences. He later formed Interexchange, which designed and operated one of the world's largest debit card systems. Most recently, from 2001 to 2007, Mr. Turock was Chief Technology Officer of Therap Services, a provider of informatics services to disabled patients. Mr. Turock received his B.S. in Experimental Psychology from Syracuse University, his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Cognitive Psychology from Rutgers University, and his M.S.E. in Computer Science from the Moore School of the University of Pennsylvania.

The Baltimore ACM chapter invites attendees for pizza starting at 6:30pm. There is no charge, but please RSVP to Emil Volcheck at .

The ETC Canton facility is located at the American Can Company complex, 2400 Boston Street in Baltimore. ETC is on the 3rd floor of the building that houses the Austin Grille restaurant and the entrance is next to the Lenscrafters store. There is a 3 hour visitor parking in front of the building on the Boston Street side.

Diversity, Identity, and Inclusion

Dr. Manuel A. Perez-Quinones

Associate Professor of Computer Science
Virginia Tech

11:00am – 12:00pm Friday 15 April 2011, ITE 229

In this talk, Dr. Pérez-Quiñones presents basic definitions of these terms and briefly discusses some of the research literature on them.  He presents evidence that supports diversity and inclusion beyond the typical social justice argument. With this as a framing context, Dr.  Pérez-Quiñones describes his experiences over the last few years working in this domain in the context of university administration, professional service activities, and researcher. Anecdotally, the stories show incidents of biases, misconceptions, misunderstandings, and resistance to change.  Based on these experiences, Dr.  Pérez-Quiñones draws conclusions and provides advice for working in diverse groups, recruiting a diverse graduate student population, and fostering an inclusive work environment.

Dr. Manuel A. Pérez-Quiñones is Associate Professor of Computer Science, and a member of the Center for Human-Computer Interaction at Virginia Tech. Pérez-Quiñones holds a DSc in CS from The George Washington University, Washington, DC. His research interests include human-computer interaction, personal information management, user interface software, digital government, and educational/cultural issues in computing. He is the author of over 80 peer-reviewed journal and conference proceeding publications, as well as co-author of 10 book chapters. He is Chair of the Coalition to Diversify Computing (2010-2011), a committee of the CRA, ACM, and IEEE-CS. Dr. Pérez-Quiñones is Director of the Personal Information Management Research lab. The PIM lab studies how individuals use technology to organize and use their information to satisfy their day to day needs. Lately the group has been studying how we make sense of the multiple devices used to manage our personal information. Outside of HCI, he has collaborated with researchers in the areas of Digital Government, Software Engineering, Computing Education, Digital Libraries, and Data Mining. Dr. Pérez-Quiñones was born and raised in Puerto Rico.

Host: Dr. Marie desJardins,

Sponsors: Dr. Pérez-Quiñones's visit to UMBC is sponsored by Women in Science and Engineering, the PROMISE program, the Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, and the Department of Information Systems.

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The Social Life of Personal Information

Dr. Manuel A. Perez-Quinones

Associate Professor of Computer Science
Virginia Tech

1:00pm Thursday 14 April 2011, ITE 325b

Personal Information Management (PIM) practices are the set of behaviors that we follow to organize our information. This often includes the management of email messages, documents, bookmarks, digital pictures, music, etc. Research in PIM has identified a core set of set of behaviors: encountering information, deciding to keep the information, filing/archiving, and reusing the information. The plethora of digital information and online transactions has us struggling to manage information effectively. In my research group, we are exploring how we can help address this problem.

In this talk, I briefly present previous work on PIM and highlight some new projects that my research group is exploring at the intersection of PIM and Social Networks. The rise of social networks presents an opportunity for the management of personal information. Emails in a person's inbox, for example, are "shared" between the sender and the receiver. What if we could share the PIM practices within our inner personal circle? Could we leverage the power of our social network to be more organized?

Dr. Manuel A. Pérez-Quiñones is Associate Professor of Computer Science, and a member of the Center for Human-Computer Interaction at Virginia Tech. Pérez-Quiñones holds a DSc in CS from The George Washington University, Washington, DC. His research interests include human-computer interaction, personal information management, user interface software, digital government, and educational/cultural issues in computing. He is the author of over 80 peer-reviewed journal and conference proceeding publications, as well as co-author of 10 book chapters. He is Chair of the Coalition to Diversify Computing (2010-2011), a committee of the CRA, ACM, and IEEE-CS. Dr. Pérez-Quiñones is Director of the Personal Information Management Research lab. The PIM lab studies how individuals use technology to organize and use their information to satisfy their day to day needs. Lately the group has been studying how we make sense of the multiple devices used to manage our personal information. Outside of HCI, he has collaborated with researchers in the areas of Digital Government, Software Engineering, Computing Education, Digital Libraries, and Data Mining. Dr. Pérez-Quiñones was born and raised in Puerto Rico.

Host: Dr. Marie desJardins,

Professor Samuel Lomonaco will present a lecture on Distributed Quantum Algorithms from 2:30 to 3:45 on Wednesday March 30 in room ITE 325b. In the talk, Professor Lomonaco will show how quantum entanglement can be used as a mechanism for controlling a network of quantum computers. The talk is open to all.

Dissertation Defense

Enabling Reproducibility of Scientific Data Flows
through Tracking and Representation of Provenance

Curt Tilmes

10:00am Thursday, 31 March 2011
ITE 325b, UMBC

Reproducibility of results is a key tenet of science. Some modern scientific domains, such as Earth Science, have become computationally complicated and, particularly with the advent of higher resolution space based remote sensing platforms, tremendously data intensive. Over the last few decades, these complexities along with the the rapid advancement of the state of the art confound the goal of scientific transparency.

This thesis explores concepts of data identification, organization, equivalence and reproducibility for such data intensive scientific processing. It presents a conceptual model useful for describing and representing data provenance suitable for very precise data and processing identification. It presents algorithms for creating and maintaining precise dataset membership and provenance equivalence at various degrees of granularity and data aggregation.

Application of this model will allow more specific data citations in scientific literature based on large datasets and data provenance equivalence. Our provenance representations will enable independent reproducibility required by scientific transparency. Increasing transparency will contribute to understanding, and ultimately, credibility of scientific results.

Committee:

• Yelena Yesha (co-chair)
• Milton Halem (co-chair)
• Tim Finin
• Anupam Joshi
• Jim Smith (NASA)